Narratives as social practice in organisational contexts

IF 0.9 4区文学 Q3 COMMUNICATION

Narrative Inquiry Pub Date : 2021-11-09 DOI:10.1075/ni.21090.van

Dorien Van De Mieroop, J. Clifton, S. Schnurr

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引用次数: 3

Abstract

Organizational studies, as a discipline, has displayed a strong interest in the use of narrative analysis to investigate issues of concern to scholars, such as those around sense-making, communication, politics and power, learning and change, as well as identity and identification (Rhodes & Brown, 2005). However, much, though of course not all, of this research has tended to focus on ‘big’ stories – i.e., “those derived from interviews, clinical encounters, autobiographical writing, and other such interrogative venues” (Freeman, 2006, p.131) – and has paid lit-tle attention to small stories – i.e., “those derived from everyday social exchanges” (Freeman, 2006, p.131; see also Georgakopoulou, 2006). Moreover, these ‘big’ stories are often analysed as decontextualized end-products (the outcome). Conse-quently, the fine-grained detail of the exact formulation of stories (the medium), which necessarily has an impact on the narrative as product, is often overlooked. Furthermore, other aspects of the storytelling activity, such as the extent to which narratives are told in collaboration with others – ranging from interviewers for ‘big’ stories to co-tellers for ‘small’ stories – and questions around why particular narratives are told at one particular point in time and place rather than at another tend to receive much less attention (though see Clifton et al., 2020). Yet, we argue that these aspects of storytelling are particularly deserving of academic attention. This is because they enable researchers to obtain a much more multi-facetted insight into how narratives are produced and how they work in the specific context in which they occur. This is exactly what a narrative as social practice-approach capitalizes on, namely the actual in situ telling of the stories (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008). It has a clear emphasis on the analysis of stories as sequentially organized dialogic constructions which are embedded in the local business of the storytellers and which are rhetorically

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叙事作为组织背景下的社会实践

组织研究作为一门学科，对使用叙事分析来调查学者关注的问题表现出了浓厚的兴趣，例如围绕意义构建、沟通、政治与权力、学习与变革以及身份与认同的问题(Rhodes & Brown, 2005)。然而，许多(当然不是全部)这类研究倾向于关注“大”故事——即“那些来自采访、临床接触、自传写作和其他问询场所的故事”(Freeman, 2006年，第131页)——而很少关注小故事——即“那些来自日常社会交流的故事”(Freeman, 2006年，第131页;参见Georgakopoulou, 2006)。此外，这些“大”故事通常被分析为脱离背景的最终产品(结果)。因此，故事(媒介)的精确表述的细枝末节往往被忽视，而这些细枝末节必然会对作为产品的叙述产生影响。此外，讲故事活动的其他方面，比如与他人合作讲述故事的程度——从“大”故事的采访者到“小”故事的共同讲述者——以及关于为什么在特定的时间和地点讲述特定的故事而不是在另一个特定的时间和地点讲述的问题，往往受到的关注要少得多(尽管见Clifton等人，2020)。然而，我们认为讲故事的这些方面特别值得学术关注。这是因为它们使研究人员能够获得更多方面的见解，了解叙事是如何产生的，以及它们如何在发生的特定背景下起作用。这正是叙事作为社会实践方法所利用的，即故事的实际现场讲述(De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008)。它明确强调将故事作为有序组织的对话结构进行分析，这些对话结构嵌入到故事讲述者的本地业务中，并且具有修辞性

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来源期刊

Narrative Inquiry Multiple-

CiteScore

2.10

自引率

14.30%

发文量

期刊介绍： Narrative Inquiry is devoted to providing a forum for theoretical, empirical, and methodological work on narrative. Articles appearing in Narrative Inquiry draw upon a variety of approaches and methodologies in the study of narrative as a way to give contour to experience, tradition, and values to next generations. Particular emphasis is placed on theoretical approaches to narrative and the analysis of narratives in human interaction, including those practiced by researchers in psychology, linguistics and related disciplines.